In operations management and industrial engineering, production flow analysis refers to methods which share the following characteristics: Methods differ on how they group together machines with products.
These play an important role in designing manufacturing cells.
Given a binary product-machines n-by-m matrix
{\displaystyle b_{ip}}
, rank order clustering[1] is an algorithm characterized by the following steps: Given a binary product-machines n-by-m matrix, the algorithm proceeds[2] by the following steps: Unless this procedure is stopped the algorithm eventually will put all machines in one single group.